The Strangers Who Stayed
Each Saturday, I share a thought-provoking journal-writing prompt here on the blog. These weekly prompts offer a specific topic or question to encourage you to explore your thoughts, emotions, and experiences. You can answer them exactly as they're written, or let them serve as a starting point for a larger, more formal piece of writing. So long as you write something in response, anything goes. But by giving yourself a specific focus, you can delve deeper into your writing and uncover new insights along the way. Feel free to personalize the prompt and make it entirely your own.
This week, I want to write about strangers.
We spend our lives writing about the people who stayed—the mothers and the best friends, the loves and the losses. But there's another cast of characters moving quietly through our stories, and most of us never give them a second thought. The woman who paid for your groceries when your card declined. The teacher you had for one semester who said one sentence you've carried for thirty years. The old man on the bus. The nurse whose name you never learned. They stepped into our lives for five minutes, or five seconds, and then walked back out—and somehow, they're still here. This week, let's write about the strangers who stayed.
Use these questions as starting points for your journal entry:
- Summon a face. Close your eyes and let one stranger surface—someone you interacted with briefly, maybe once, whose face you can still picture. Don't reach for the most meaningful one. Take whoever comes. Describe them: what they were wearing, how they held themselves, the weather that day, what you were doing before they appeared.
- Trace the smallest kindness. Think of a time a stranger was good to you for no reason at all—no obligation, no audience, nothing to gain. What did they do? And be honest about where you were standing in your life when it happened. Sometimes the smallest kindness lands hardest because it arrives on the worst day.
- Turn it around. Now consider that you have been a stranger in someone else's story. Is there a moment you suspect—or hope—someone remembers you for? A time you helped, or listened, or simply showed up in the right five minutes? Write about it. And if you can't think of one, write instead about the kind of stranger you'd like to be.
- Wonder about the ones who passed. Some strangers we notice and never speak to: the couple arguing in a parked car, the woman crying in the grocery aisle, the man who caught your eye on a train platform and then was gone. Choose one you've wondered about and imagine their life. Give them a name, a kitchen, a Tuesday. What are they carrying?
- Write the letter. Pick one stranger from anywhere in your life and write them a short letter they will never read. Tell them what they did. Tell them what it meant. Say the thank-you or the I'm sorry or the I still think about you that never had anywhere to go.
Take one of these prompts, or weave them all together. Or simply go somewhere public with your notebook, watch the world go by, and write about whoever crosses your path. You might let the art images guide you, too. So long as you're writing about the strangers who stayed, anything goes.
My challenges and prompts are not interactive. You don't have to come back to link up. No comments are required—just your creativity. 🌻